The fun thing about Doorknobs and Bodypaint is the prompts they give in the guidelines for each issue. They are split up into Dorsal, Doorknobs, Hayward Faultline, Tapas, and the Cairo Room. The Cairo Room can be anything within the issue’s theme, such as the theme for my issue, in February, was Love, the most recent one was Hot Summer Nights. Each of the other sections must include a certain word, or turn of phrase, or setting. For example, the Hayward Faultline prompts for the Work issue last May were:

HAYWARD FAULT LINE (shake us up)
1. Maximum length: 450 words.
2. The sub-theme is: toil.
3. The setting is: Auckland, NZ.
4. Within the story, you must use this bit of text: gum up.

Fun prompts like these give a writer a chance to stretch out of their comfort zones, look at new ideas and old stories in ways that they hadn’t thought of before.

For example, the story I had published there in February, “Hello Young Lovers” was already pretty much written when the guidelines came out, but I hadn’t found a home for it yet. It was the only real love story I had sitting around on my hard drive, but the prompts from DK & BP required the story to take place in the mid fifties, and my story was a modern one. So, I changed Baby Girl‘s Juicy Couture jeans into pedal pushers, played a little with the language, changing a few words to include the phrasing the Dorsal prompt required, (charity of second chances was originally just plain old second chances), and a masterpiece was written. At least, I convinced myself and the editors of DK & BP it was so.

Today, click on the link, read through some of the old and new guidelines for Doorknobs and Body Paint, and try your hand at one. Send it to them, or post it here with me. Stretch those writing wings a little.